Backing up of data (e.g., remote back up) associated with a source storage system at a destination storage system may aid recovery of “lost” data at the source storage system. The “lost” data may signify data accidentally/erroneously deleted from the source storage system and/or data corrupted at the source storage system. The aforementioned backing up of the data may be performed using a backup engine (e.g., NetApp®'s SnapVault®) associated with the source storage system and the destination storage system.
When there is no difference between data associated with the source storage system and the data backed up at the destination storage system, save for a folder of data and/or a file accidentally deleted from the source storage system, an incremental restore process may be performed, whereby a differential data corresponding to the data accidentally deleted alone may be transferred from the destination storage system to the source storage system. The aforementioned incremental restore process may be possible when the source storage system and the destination storage system have the same storage operating systems associated therewith.
For example, when the source storage system is a third-party application server, the storage operating system associated therewith may be different from that of the destination storage system. Here, the granularity of source data at the destination storage system may be different from the granularity at the source storage system. Thus, even if a mere single file is deleted from the source storage system, an entire container associated with the single file may need to be restored.
The time consumed for the full restore may be large compared to the time consumed during a corresponding incremental restore process, if possible to perform. Moreover, as the source storage system and the destination storage system may be configured to communicate with each other through a computer network, bandwidth associated therewith may increase. Further, storage requirements at the source storage system may increase for the full restore process. The expenses associated with the aforementioned time increase and bandwidth/storage requirement increase during data recovery may be prohibitive for a concerned organization backing up data thereof at the destination storage system.